And even if you enable it, it should work with local LLMs. And at least from the article it doesn't appear to be the case.
...and sidebar access to chatbots (including Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Le Chat Mistral).
At least we can still buy HDDs. Oh, wait...
For anyone wondering, what they did was release documentation for the API of the device. They didn't open source the firmware, or god forbid the hardware. Of course it's better than nothing as it makes the life of third-party integration developers easier, but the title is pretty misleading.
It's also useful for prototyping. Put something together quickly as a proof of concept and then do it the proper way. That is how I mostly use it at least.
I find your project very interesting, I have to point out a bit of irony though. You say,
Phones just do too much these days. And I don't get the feeling they respect my time nor privacy.
However, making regular voice calls and sending SMS over the cell network is absolutely not private. If you want privacy you need the ability to utilize end to end encryption, and to do that you need a device capable of running something like Signal.
Other than that I agree with your other points. I too miss the days where phones didn't all look like a slab of glass and every manufacturer wasn't afraid to experiment with all sorts of cool features.
I do blame them because they actively choose to launch different products nobody asked for (e.g a Bitcoin wallet) instead of focusing on feature parity. I pay the exact same amount of money as a Windows user but I get less. Proton is a privacy focused company so naturaly the number of their customers running Linux is gonna be much greater than the average software company.
Linux has been treated as a second class citizen by Proton with pretty much all their products. Just look at the state of the ProtonVPN client compared to Windows. They are simply allocating less resources to Linux development in general compared to other platforms.
If it's something like a bank or the government which already know my real identity then I don't really care. For anything else, then I just don't use the service.
Smart products themselves are not the issue. The issue is making everything cloud based. The solution is companies designing their products so they can be controlled over the network.
It's a fucking bed! It doesn't need a persistent connection to some server. The problem is that they also want to mine and sell your data.
There is special category for Internet of Shit devices, that not only are cloud based but also require a persistent connection to a server to even execute basic functions.
One more reason, there is a "copy as cURL" option in the Firefox developer tools network tab. It gives you a perfect cURL command including all the necessary cookies and headers to send the exact HTTP request that your browser just sent.
I know it's not using them without my input, what I'm saying is that there should be a local option.